Diogenes, seeing all this fervent coming-and-going yet not being employed by the magistrates on anything whatsoever, spent a few days contemplating their behaviour without uttering a word. Then, moved by the martial spirit, he cast his cloke about him like a scarf, rolled his sleeves right up to his elbows, tucked in his robe like a peasant picking apples, entrusted to an ancient companion his shoulder-wallet, his books and his writing-tablets, went forth from the city in the direction of the Cranion (a hill and promontory hard by Corinth) on to the fair esplanade, and there trundled the earthenware barrel which served him as a shelter from inclement weather, and then, flexing his arms with great mental ardour, he turned it, churned it, upturned it; [spattered it,] battered it, bent it, bonked it, [dubbed it, scrubbed it, rubbed it, flattered it,] banged it, beat it; bumped it, topsy’d it, turvy’d it, dribbled it, tapped it, ting-ed it; stoppered it, unstoppered it, paced it, ambled it, shambled it, haggled it; tossed it, stopped it, [prodded it,] shot it; lifted it, laved it, louvered it; hampered it, aimed it, blamed it, blocked it; troubled it, huddled it, splattered it; fashioned it, fastened it; [walloped it, dolloped it, tickled it, tarred it, smutched it, touched it, hawked it, mawked it, hooked it, crooked it, twiddled it, twaddled it,] charmed it, armed it, alarmed it, saddled it, straddled it, caparisoned it, and – volleying it down from mount to vale – tumbled it along the Cranion, and then (as Sisyphus did with his stone) pushed it back up from vale to mount so that he all but holed it.
On seeing which, one of his friends asked him what had possessed him to make him so afflict his mind, body and barrel. Our philosopher replied that, not being employed by the State in any other task, he was storming about with his barrel so as not to be seen as the only one idle and dilatory amidst folk so ardent and busy.
It is the same for me: I am void of fear though not of care, caring that nobody thinks me in any way worthy of being put to work and seeing that everyone else throughout this most-noble Cisalpine and Transalpine Realm [of France] is urgently making preparations and toiling away, some defensively (fortifying the country), some offensively (repulsing the foe), everything so well ordered in so wondrous an accord and with such evident future benefit – since from henceforth France will have superb frontiers and the French will live assuredly in peace – that only a little holds me back from adopting the opinion of that good man Heraclitus that war is the Father of all that is good, and from believing that in Latin war is called bellum – ‘fair’ – not by antiphrasis (as has been conjectured by some pickers-over of old Latin scrap-iron), because in warfare, fair things are found not, but: absolutely and straightforwardly because in warfare all species of the fair and good do appear whilst all species of the evil and ugly are spurned. To prove which, mark that the wise and pacific king Solomon found no better way of describing divine Wisdom than by likening her to an army set in battle array.
So since I was not assigned or allotted by our people to any rank on the offensive side – being reckoned too weak and infirm – nor employed on the other – defensive – side (were it but bearing hod, digging bog, [binding rod] or turning sod: it’s all the same to me!) I accounted it more than a moderate disgrace to appear an idle spectator of so many valiant, able and chivalrous personages who, in a spectacle staged before the whole of Europe, were acting out their parts in that remarkable play and tragic drama whilst I never bestirred myself nor devoted to it that ‘nothing’ which is all that is left to me. For small honour accrues, I think, to those who merely look on, husband their forces, hide away their money, secrete their silver and scratch their heads with one finger like vulgar louts, yawn at the flies like a parson’s veal-calves and at the song of the music-makers simply prick up their ears like asses in Arcady, tacitly signifying by their looks that they approve of the roles being played.
Having made that choice and election, I thought that I would be doing a task neither useless nor inopportune if I trundled my Diogenic barrel (which alone remains to me after my past shipwreck in the Narrows of Ill-encounter). But what shall I achieve, do you think, by traipsing about with my barrel? By that Virgin who tugged her skirts right up, I still have no idea!3
Wait a bit while I take a swig from this bottle: it is my one true Helicon, my Caballine stream, my sole breath of Enthusiasm. While drinking from it I deliberate, ponder, resolve and conclude. After the peroration I laugh, write, compose and drink. Ennius wrote as he drank and drank as he wrote; Aeschylus (if you trust Plutarch in his Symposiaca) composed as he drank, drank as he composed; Homer never wrote fasting: Cato never wrote before drinking: so you cannot say I live without the example of men praised and highly esteemed. The wine is good and cool enough, say just above the threshold of the second degree. For which may God, the good God Sabaoth (of Armies, that is) be forever praised.
If you fellows also discreetly take one big swig or two little swigs at it I can see nothing wrong in that, provided that you thank God just one tiny bit for everything.
Since such is my lot or my destiny – for we cannot all enter Corinth and dwell there – I am determined to serve one and all. Far from me to be sluggish and idle. As for the pioneers, the sappers and the men strengthening the ramparts, I shall do what Neptune and Apollo did in Troy under Laomedon, and what Renaud de Montauban did in the last days of his life: I will wait upon the masons, boil up for the masons and, once the meal is over, juggle up on my pipes a jig for the jongleurs.
[Thus by sounding his lyre in days of yore did Amphion found, build and extend the great and celebrated city of Thebes.]
For those fighting-men I am going to broach my barrel again. From the draught I shall draw off (which would have been very well known to you from my two earlier volumes if the falsifications of printers had not perverted and corrupted them) I shall pour out for those men a good Third and merry Quart of Pantagruelic Sentences from the cru of our epicene pastimes. You may rightly dub them Diogenic. And since I cannot be their comrade-in-arms, they shall have me as their loyal Ruler-of-the-Feast, refreshing them to the limits of my puny powers when they return from the fray, and (as I insist) the tireless eulogizer of their exploits and glorious feats of arms.
By God’s own passion-flower I shall not fail in this, unless Mars fails to turn up in Lent: but the old fornicator will take care not to do that!
Yet I recall having read that Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, displayed to the Egyptians one day in an open amphitheatre, a Bactrian camel amongst the spoils and booty of his conquests – it was entirely black – and with it a parti-coloured slave, half black, half white, not divided at the diaphragm (like that woman consecrated to the Indic Venus who was discovered by the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana somewhere between the river Hydaspes and the Caucasus) but perpendicularly, things never seen before in Egypt. He hoped by the gift of such novelties to increase the people’s love for him.
But what happened?
When the camel was produced everyone was horrified and affronted; at the sight of the parti-coloured man some scoffed while others loathed him as a ghastly monstrosity produced by some defect of Nature. In short the hope he had had of pleasing his Egyptians and so increasing their natural affection for him slipped through his fingers, and he learnt that they took more pleasure and delight in things which are beautiful, elegant and perfect than in things ridiculous and monstrous. He subsequently felt such contempt for both the slave and the camel that (from neglect and lack of ordinary care) they soon bartered life for death.
That example makes me waver between hope and fear, dreading that instead of anticipated pleasure I find what I abhor: that my treasure be nothing but coal-dust and that my knucklebones throw up not Venus but the Shaggy Dog; that instead of serving I offend; instead of pleasing I displease, and that my lot be that of Euclion’s cockerel (made so famous amongst others by Plautus in his Aulularia and Ausonius in his Gryphus) which scratched up the treasure only to have its slizzard git!
Were that to happen to me, should I get mad? It happened before: it could happen agai
n. But by Hercules it will not, for I recognize in all of them a specific form and an individual property which our elders called pantagruelism, by means of which they will never take in bad part anything they know to flow from a good, frank and loyal heart. I have seen them regularly accept good-will as payment and, when attributable to weak resources, be satisfied with it.
Having dispatched that matter, to my barrel I return. Companions, tackle the wine! Drink, my lads, by the jugful. But if it does not seem good to you, leave it alone. I’m not one of those importunate Switzers who, by force, violence and brutality, oblige their fellows to swill down their wine in a bottoms-up carouse. Any good drinker, any good sufferer from the gout coming thirsty to this my barrel need not drink from it if he doesn’t want to. If any do want to, and if the wine be pleasing to the lordliness of their lordships, then let them drink frankly, freely and boldly, without payment and without stint. Such is my decree.
And there is no need to fear that the wine will run out as it did at that wedding at Cana in Galilee. As much as you draw off from the bung I shall funnel in through the lid. And thus will the barrel remain inexhaustible. It has a living spring, an everlasting stream: such was the liquor represented figuratively by the Brahmin sages which was held in the goblet of Tantalus; such was that mountain of salt in Iberia so celebrated by Cato; such was the golden bough sacred to the goddess of the Underworld and so highly celebrated by Virgil. It is a real cornucopia of joy and merriment. If it seems at times to be drained to the lees, it will not have run dry: good hope lies there at the bottom as in Pandora’s bottle, not despair as in the cask of the Danaïds.
Now mark well what I have said and what sort of people I invite. For (let nobody be misled) I am following the example of Lucilius, who proclaimed that he wrote only for his own townsmen of Tarento and Cosenza: my barrel I have broached for you alone, [good folk,] my best-vintage drinkers and gouty men of good alloy. Gigantic, fog-swallowing, munch-bribe magistrates are already occu-pied-arsed enough, with bundles enough on their hooks to serve as venison. Let them toil away at it if they want to: there are no game-birds for them here. And I beg you – by the venerated name of the four cheeks which begot you and of the life-giving peg which then coupled them together – never mention to me those doctorally bonneted legal brains sieving through their amendments. And black-beetle hypocrites even less, despite their all being outrageous drinkers and scab-encrusted syphilitics, furnished with an unquenchable thirst and an insatiable desire to masticate. Why? Because, though they sometimes counterfeit mendicants, they are not on the side of the Good but of Evil – indeed of that Evil which we daily pray God to deliver us from. But you can never teach an old monkey to pull a pretty face! Back, you curs! Out of my way, out of my sunshine you fiendish monklings. Are you coming here to arse about, drawing up arse-tickles against my wine and pissing all over my barrel? Look! Here is the cudgel which Diogenes ordered in his will to be laid beside him after his death in order to beat off and belabour such corpse-burning grubs and Cerberean mastiffs. Sheep-dogs, look to your flocks! And you black-beetles. In the devil’s name get out! Still there? I renounce my share of Papimania if I can catch you! Grr, grrr, grrrrrr. Get ‘em, boy! Get ‘em. May you never shit save when lashed by stirrup-leather, |never piss save when on the strappado,] and never get it up except through a good cudgelling.
How Pantagruel shipped Utopians off to colonize Dipsody
CHAPTER 1
[A lesson in colonization. It sets off the new Pantagruel as a princely statesman. A biblically based smile is again aroused by the New Testament practice of numbering crowds ‘not counting women and children’.
‘Ruling with a rod of iron’ is biblical too (Revelation 2:27), but the references and tone overall are markedly Classical: Rabelais draws upon Cicero, Plutarch and Hesiod. Virgil is cited in French (Georgics, IV, 561) and Homer is directly alluded to (Iliad, I, 375 and IV, 236). There are continued debts to Erasmus, including to the Adages (II, I, XCIV, ‘On not remembering evils’, and I, VIL LXXII, ‘Things acquired badly perish badly’.]
Once Pantagruel had entirety subdued the land of Dipsody he planted there a colony of Dipsodians numbering 9876543210 men (not counting the women and children), skilled workmen in all the trades and gentlemen professing all the liberal disciplines in order to reinvigorate, people and grace that country which was but a sparsely peopled and partly uninhabited land without them.
He moved them there not so much because of the overpopulation of Utopia, where men and women had indeed multiplied like locusts – without my going further into detail you are quite aware that the men of Utopia had genitals so prolific, and the women of Utopia wombs so ample, voracious, retentive and well-constructed of cells that at the end of every ninth month seven children at least, both male and female, were born of each marriage following the example of the people of Israel in Egypt, unless de Lyra was delirious; not so much, either, because of the fertility of the soil, the healthiness of the climate and the attractiveness of the land of Dipsody, but rather so as to keep that land dutiful and obedient by newly resettling there his old and faithful subjects who, from time immemorial, had never known, recognized or admitted any lord but him and who, as soon as they were born into this world, had with their mothers’ milk been suckled on the sweetness and generosity of his rule, being forever infused with it and brought up on it, which gave a firm hope that they would rather abandon their bodily lives than that unique and primary duty which is owed by nature to monarchs by their subjects, no matter where they might be resettled or transplanted. And not only would they and the generations successively born to their blood live like that, but they would also maintain in the same feudal obedience the peoples freshly added to his empire.
That did indeed happen and he was in no wise frustrated in his plans. For although the Utopians had been loyal and faithful subjects before that colonization, the Dipsodians became even more so after having spent but a few days among them, on account of that curious zeal which comes naturally to all human beings at the beginning of any enterprise which they concur in; but they did have one complaint: they called on the heavens and the Intelligences which move the spheres to witness their regret at not having had the renown of Pantagruel brought sooner to their notice.
You will therefore, you drinkers, take note that the way to hold and uphold a newly conquered land is not (as has been to their shame and dishonour the erroneous opinion of certain tyrannical minds) by pillaging, crushing, press-ganging, impoverishing and provoking the people, ruling them with a rod of iron: in short, by gobbling them up and devouring them, like the wicked king whom Homer dubs Demoboros, that is, Devourer of his people.
I shall not quote to you the ancient histories on this matter; I will simply recall to your minds what your fathers saw, and you too if you are not too young. Like new-born babes they should be suckled, dandled and amused; like newly planted trees they should be supported, secured and protected against every wind, harm and injury; like convalescents saved from a long and serious illness they should be spoiled, spared and given strength, in order that they themselves should conceive the opinion that there is no king or prince in the world whom they would less want for a foe, more desire for a friend. Thus did Osiris, that great king of the Egyptians, conquer the entire earth, not so much by force of arms as by reducing drudgery, teaching folk how to lead good healthy lives, giving appropriate laws and by benevolence and graciousness. For which everyone (by a commandment of Jupiter given to a certain Pamyla) surnamed him the great King Euergetes (that is, Benefactor).
In fact Hesiod in his Theogony classes good daemons – call them angels [or Geniuses] if you so prefer – as intermediaries and mediators between the gods and men, superior to men but inferior to gods. And because the blessings and riches of Heaven reach us via their hands, and because they are always beneficent to us, continually preserving us from harm, he says that they perform the duties of kings, it being a uniquely royal action always to do good and never to do ill.
Thus did Alexander of Macedon become the emperor of the whole world; thus was Hercules possessed of all the mainland, delivering mankind from monsters, oppression, exactions and tyrannies, governing and treating them well, maintaining them in equity and justice, founding for them benign constitutions and laws appropriate to the site of each country, supplying what was lacking, turning to profit whatever was abundant, forgiving the past and casting all previous offences into eternal oblivion: such, after the tyrants were overthrown by the bravery and industry of Thrasybulus, was the ‘amnesty’ of the Athenians which was later expounded in Rome by Cicero and restored under the emperor Aurelian.
Those are the love-filters, spells and charms by which one peacefully retains what has been painfully conquered. And no conqueror can more happily reign – be he king, prince or philosopher – than by making justice follow hard upon valour. His valour was manifested in victory and conquest: his justice will be manifested when, with the love and good will of the people, he makes laws, publishes decrees, establishes religious ceremonies and treats each person aright; as the noble poet Virgil says of Octavian Augustus:
Victorious, he founded laws, and meant
The vanquished to obey them by consent.
That is why Homer in his Iliad calls good princes and kings Kosmetoras laon, that is to say, Ornaments of their Peoples.
Such was the intention of Numa Pompilius, the second king of the Romans, a just man, an urbane ruler and a philosopher, when he ordained that nothing that had died was to be sacrificed to the god Terminus on his festal day (which was called the Terminalia): he was showing them that the termini – the frontiers and the marches of kingdoms – should be guarded and governed in peace, friendship and courtesy, without staining one’s hands with blood or pillage. Whoever does otherwise will not only lose what he has acquired but also suffer the stigma and opprobrium of being judged to have wrongly and evilly acquired it, as a consequence of its having perished in his hands. Thing evilly acquired evilly expires. Even though he might peacefully enjoy it throughout his own lifetime, if it perished under his heirs the dead man will suffer the same stigma and his reputation will be accursed as that of an evil conqueror, for you have a common proverbial saying, Thing evilly acquired the third heir ne’er enjoys.
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 42